He scarcely looked to see if his furrow was going straight.  The work he was doing was so much in his blood that he could almost feel if furrows were straight or not.  Year after year they moved on the same old landmarks; thorn trees and briars mostly guided the plow, where they stood on the untamed land beyond; the thorn trees grew old at their guiding, and still the furrows varied not by the breadth of a hoof-mark.

John, as he plowed, had leisure to meditate on much besides the crops; he knew so much of the crops that his thoughts could easily run free from them; he used to meditate on who they were that lived in briar and thorn tree, and danced as folk said all through midsummer night, and sometimes blessed and sometimes harmed the crops; for he knew that in Old England were wonderful ancient things, odder and older things than many folks knew.  And his eyes had leisure to see much beside the furrows, for he could almost feel the furrows going straight.

One day at his plowing, as he watched the thorn ahead, he saw the whole big hill besides, looking south, and the lands below it; one day he saw in the bright sun of late winter a horseman riding the road through the wide lands below.  The horseman shone as he rode, and wore white linen over what was shining, and on the linen was a big red cross. ``One of them knights,’’ John Plowman said to himself or his horse, ``going to them crusades.’’ And he went on with his plowing all that day satisfied, and remembered what he had seen for years, and told his son.

For there is in England, and there always was, mixed with the needful things that feed or shelter the race, the wanderer-feeling for romantic causes that runs deep and strange through the other thoughts, as the Gulf Stream runs through the sea.  Sometimes generations of John Plowman’s family would go by and no high romantic cause would come to sate that feeling.  They would work on just the same though a little sombrely, as though some good thing had been grudged them.  And then the Crusades had come, and John Plowman had seen the Red Cross knight go by, riding towards the sea in the morning, and Jon Plowman was satisfied.

Some generations later a man of the same name was plowing the same hill.  They still plowed the brown clay at the top and left the slope wild, though there were many changes.  And the furrows were wonderfully straight still.  And half he watched a thorn tree ahead as he plowed and half he took in the whole hill sloping south and the wide lands below it, far beyond which was the sea.  They had a railway now down in the valley.  The sunlight glittering near the end of winter shone on a train that was marked with great white squares and red crosses on them.